Search Engines and Online Reviews Represent Affiliate Opportunities

Earlier today eMarketer has published some interesting data on the sources that consumers use in their pre-purchase product research. Two reasons why we couldn’t miss this: (1) the data was from our client, Compete.com, whose affiliate program we manage, and (2) if you look at the below data carefully, you can actually figure out the percentage of affiliate opportunity in each of these four sectors: Grocery, Health & Beauty, Household Essentials, and Pet Supply.

Subtracting retail websites (the most popular source “used to research products prior to purchasing online”), salespeople and product display in stores, emails and mailings from retailer, advice from friends and family, hard copies of magazines, newspapers and professional reviews, and those who said they do not do any research, we will arrive at the following “percentages of opportunity” (for affiliates) arranged in order of importance/popularity:

b) Thanks to pay-per-call solutions, affiliates can now successfully use those “hard copies” and “offline ads” as marketing channels too;

c) Those 28%-42% who answered “I did not do any research before making the purchase” still represent an opportunity for affiliates. You can target frugal shoppers, shopping cart abandoners, those who are potentially interested in a particular merchant but haven’t even tried shopping with them (through remarketing efforts), etc.